


Reconnaissance Drop

by Fides Est Rubis (LauraDoloresIssum)



Category: Warhammer - All Media Types, Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Imperial Guard, Military Science Fiction, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-04
Updated: 2017-08-04
Packaged: 2018-12-10 22:52:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11701536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LauraDoloresIssum/pseuds/Fides%20Est%20Rubis
Summary: Katya Tandy and the 328th Treni Light Infantry do a simple recon mission. Simple by 40k standards, anyway.





	Reconnaissance Drop

Sceptri V looked like a shithole, and they weren’t even standing on it yet. Vast brown splotches covered the surface, the sort of brown splotches that looked ugly from space but you just knew were hellish masses of waist-deep, parasite-infested molasses mud. What wasn’t a fecal smear of brown was washed-out lime green fields, tinged with brown. Dense patches of dark coppery forest grew here in there in the lowlands, so far below the water table that you’d probably need a submarine to find the roots. Little dark blue lakes were scattered thinly around. Perfect place for screaming clumps of fungus to call home.

According to auspex readings, Sceptri V was classified as a feral world. No sentient life, at least until the Orks had started popping up. It was eighty percent landmass, saline water with hints of mercury. Water samples tested for abnormally high levels of iron, copper, zinc, and cobalt, so Administratum was supposedly hoping for minable veins, assuming that they could somehow get to it under all that mud. Cloud cover was heavy and the planet had no moons at all. Of course, the squad had not been issued night-vision gear. The winds were omnipresent, storm-force in Sceptri’s calm season, gale-force the rest of the time, and the calm season had passed three local months ago. Humidity was consistently in the eighty to ninety-five percent range, although the winds tended to keep the water too diffuse to ever become rain. The entire place looked to be hopping with eye-rot, wormlung, and gremlin flu. Pleasant and safe swamp planets certainly existed, but Sceptri V was not one of them.

Echo eyed it unenthusiastically through the window. She would feel better about this mission, she knew, if she were the one operating the Valkyrie. The pilot was not experienced enough to handle these high winds, and they were unceasingly tossed around as though they were in a washing machine. Thank the Emperor this was only a recon mission. The largest Ork clump was in the middle of one of the forest patches, a little south of the equator and currently on the night side of the planet. They would drop onto a nearby field and make their way there on foot. Their assignment was just to vox back enemy strength and positions, then pull out and wait around for the 101st Vendoland Mechanized to plod up and blast everything to bits. Then they could get the hell off this planet.

Echo could feel herself drawing looks from the rest of the squad. She glanced purposefully around the cabin. Several pairs of eyes hastily glanced down. So far as she was concerned, these undisciplined bastards could meet the Emperor as early as they liked.

“Glorygirl,” someone muttered.

“Plateback.”

 _Toy soldiers and sawedoffs, the lot of you_ , she thought but did not say. The usual friendly nicknames between Stormtroopers and regular enlisted.

“Quiet down, there!” yelled the sergeant. His name was Benning, which Echo found simultaneously funny and painful. Grudgingly, they did indeed quiet down, although they did not stop looking. Echo knew what they were looking at. Her flak vest and helmet were colored a palette of dark mottled greys and greens, and she still wore the red veteran stripe on her left shoulder and a different company number on the right.

If they were expecting anything posher they were to be sorely disappointed. Her kit, including her microbead and photovisor, her carapace armor, and even her carbine, whose machine spirit had always been friendly to her, were still in the hands of the enemy. The magnoculars, bizarrely, the aliens had returned with newer, better lenses. Since she had officially been reassigned to this 328th Treni Light Infantry regiment in an “advising” capacity, she had been reissued more suitable gear according to their regiment standards (read: cheaper and less of it) but in her home quality and colors. This was the only thing that caused her to hold out some hope that she might eventually be transferred back. Elysia spared no expense on its own regiments, but kept careful track of where that expensive gear went, as the galactic need was literally endless, and material and labor to craft those supplies not so endless. They wouldn’t waste them on a trooper they didn’t consider one of their own.

She hadn’t bothered trying to mingle. For many of the sawedoffs this was only their second or third mission, which was a level of inexperience she couldn’t even recall. They all had slightly strange names, and too many of them were similar. There was a Garland, a Glendon, a Turner, a Tanner, a Thurston, a Baley, a Bennet, a Booth, a Brown, a Joyce, a Norris, and an Alton. She’d see which ones survived before she bothered memorizing them. They feuded nearly openly, stole from each other’s kits, and tried to sneak out during drills to hit the canteen. They talked about sexy strangers they were going to frak on foreign planets and how terrible the food was, as if wishing would make either miracle happen. Had she ever been as childish as this? She couldn’t even remember, but guessed the answer was no.

Among Elysian regiments there were certainly rivalries and jibe-hurling, but they took pride in making their insults musical or witty. A particularly famed trooper in the 203rd (appropriately named Victus) was known for being able to shoot off astute and stinging narratives that covered everything from the offender’s appearance to his presumed family history whenever she was asked to, complete with internal rhyme and puns, all to the tune of “I Shipped, D’Ye See, in a Revenue Sloop”. Echo had seen such a display firsthand. Sometimes there was dancing.

Ultimately, though, it was the memories that isolated her. Echo did not think of herself as a sentimental woman, but she found herself thinking often of her old squadmates, about if they were alive and how badly they might be suffering at Eldar hands. Why the aliens had let her go, she had no idea. Perhaps Darrow’s memories had made her unfit in some way, and the Farseer had been honor-bound by its promise to leave her alive. She had lost squadmates before of course, but not for years, and in combat, not like this. And who in the 328th Treni Light Infantry wanted to listen to how musclebound, burn-scarred Bethany Makka would always raise her hand to speak like a little girl asking to take a piss, or how Teagan Harnick had been a snappy dresser and danced the fastest hornpipe in the regiment? Or how Cort Dominic had confessed to her once that he had snuck out as a boy and honed his knife skills in underground fighting rings when he felt (fraking _how_?) that the Schola was training him too slowly? The nightmares were bad enough, Echo didn’t need to be pouring out her life story to anyone.

She didn’t question why a light infantry company was being deployed for a reconnaissance job, or why they weren’t simply being put in an infantry box and dropped from orbit, as would be usual. A drop at night onto an unknown planet was not all that strange for her, but there was a reason why ordinary regiments referred to chute deployments as “the one-way ticket.” Even if she cared enough to ask, she knew she wouldn’t get anything but a beating for her trouble. Even the sergeants of standard squads were not privy to the basic mission information she was used to. She was expendable now, like the rest of them.

“Aright, up!” yelled Sergeant Benning. “We drop in two minutes!”

Two minutes? But no sense getting cocky; two minutes or ten seconds, drop or fall were still the only choices you had. She accepted her gravchute and looked it over. It was rusty around the welds and something rattled when she tilted it. She took a moment to pray to it, introducing herself, and then strapped it on without hesitation, taking her time to make sure everything was properly adjusted. The others were pale-faced and quiet now. Nothing like having to jump out of a moving aircraft hundreds of feet in the air to take the piss out of stupid rookies, she supposed.

They had all been shown how to use the chutes, and repeatedly assured that they were far more valuable than their lives. But now the squad seemed to be having a little trouble; grudgingly, she pretended something was wrong with hers, undid everything, and made a little show of examining it and putting it back on. She saw several of them (was it Thurston, Turner, and Joyce?) surreptitiously copying her. She even felt the pullstring and lever as though out of habit. Really expensive gravchutes, whose owners were too rich to risk their lives, measured how far you were from the ground and deployed automatically at a certain distance, but even Echo had never seen one of those. The only kind she knew was the manual one, where you yanked on the metal pullstring to start the liftpack, which would spin up to full power within milliseconds and begin generating an anti-gravitic suspensor field that would slow your descent to the ground without having to rely on atmosphere density. The small J-shaped shift by the right arm controlled the maneuvering air jets on the sides and bottom. More yank upward meant more lift, downward meant less, side to side was pretty self-explanatory. Simple enough, when the skies were clear and you were aiming for a landing pad. In total darkness, though, with these winds, and chutes that had rust on the joints…

She made sure she was first in line.

The back hatch was flung open and she was staring out into a pitch-black void. She could hear the scream of air rushing below her. The Valkyrie was going dangerously low; it rocked badly. She could feel the rush of endorphins as she stared into utter nothingness, swaying back and forth on her feet to keep herself balanced. Emperor, this felt good. _Emperor_ , she had missed this.

“Go!” the Sergeant screamed in her ear. Without the slightest hesitation she demonstrated a textbook drop; she ran and leapt full-force out of the aircraft, clearing the edge of the hatch with room to spare and spreading her limbs—

— _when she hit the net, hanging there spread-eagled_ —

—like an Aquila, limbs slightly bent, hurtling headfirst toward the ground. She pulled her left arm into her chest and hit the button that hopefully lit up the signal light attached to the back of her chute. There was no way to tell if anyone could see it. She could hear nothing, see nothing without her photovisor. There was no way to know when the ground was coming up, and the chute only had so much charge.

Even knowing that she might die… no, especially knowing that she might die, she felt the first joy she had known in four months. The exhilarating feeling of freefall, of the wind rushing in her ears, could only be topped by the happiness of lift-off. And this wind in particular was already half water and punishingly hard, fighting to push her off course. She tried to angle into it to slow her sideways movement, but it was like trying to angle into a solid wall. She dryly hoped wind had been taken into account when distance from the drop zone had been calculated.

Instinct and experience suddenly told her to hit the chute, so she did. For a terrible, wonderful moment, the engines sputtered and faded, then flickered into glowing blue life. She was pulled upward into a standing position, legs together and arms in. She shouted back to the gravchute, the wind snatching the words out of her mouth, that once they were on the ground she was going to kiss it. With the power of the suspension field on her side, she steadied herself and searched downwards. And miraculously there it was to her left, the small but unmistakable yellow shine of a glow-pack. Whoever had planted it was doubtless long gone by now. She could see why they had used one; no flare could survive this wet. She was already pouring water off her harsh-weather gear and she hadn’t even hit earth yet. She had overshot the mark considerably, but she had pulled up in good time and she was already coming in at a rough diagonal.

She made it just inside the circle of light and tugged the cord again at the last possible second, not wanting to give up to the wind again. That turned out to be a good idea. She managed to land gently in a crouching position, legs spread to brace herself against the wind, and stood up, hunching. The ground was rubbery and hard to keep a footing on. True to her word, the first thing she did was pull the gravchute off and kiss it. The second was to take out a lho. Lhos were finger-sized cylinders made from dried and shredded lhograss, a fairly ubiquitous plant on Imperium worlds, and wrapped in the husks. Toxin content varied wildly depending on the planet that supplied them, although the horrors of the galaxy meant that most Guardsmen ended up addicted anyway. It could be a decently powerful narcotic depending on whether or not you used the filter, and it was occasionally used as emergency anesthetic. The end was coated with a resin that ignited when air passed through the lho fast enough, meaning they were instantly lightable but making a tightly sealed container a must. In this damp it took a couple gasps to start it. Then she waited.

The first figure landed and dropped to the ground, shivering and swearing, then shortly afterward two more, the winners of the inexperience lottery. One picked up the glow-pack and held it above their head, waving it back and forth as though that would make it any more visible than a single pinprick of light in a sea of darkness already was. Echo appreciated their optimism. She stayed out of their way, finishing her lho. It would soften the exhausting ups and downs this kind of mission brought; bored, tired walking punctuated with short frantic scrambles of running and shooting, like unattached exclamation points.

A fourth dim outline touched the ground. It was the Sergeant. He went around to the three survivors, pounding them on the back and shouting, but his words were lost in the wind. She wasn’t sure if he was congratulating them or repudiating them, and decided she didn’t care. She bounced slightly on the spongy soil. She couldn’t hear the squelching noise, but she could imagine it.

“One minute, then we move,” the Sergeant shouted, his voice barely audible from where Echo stood at the other end of the illuminated patch. He switched his chute for the vox pack, a bulky boxlike thing that was worn like a backpack and allowed communications off-planet. He said something into the vox. Presumably something came back out.

Suddenly, a figure plummeted toward their little circle from about maybe a dozen meters up, probably screaming. Looked to be one of theirs. Echo took a last inhale and strode over, scraping the remnants out of her filter and putting it back in her pocket. Who knew what had gone wrong. Maybe they had panicked and never hit the chute.

The flailing Guardsman hit the ground. For a moment there was an optical illusion as they seemed to vanish. She blinked. The private with the light ran over and held it up. The fallen trooper was indeed gone. They congregated around. A ragged hole had been ripped right through the ground, leaving a dark space that glittered faintly. Hesitatingly, the trooper holding the glow-pack knelt and sank her hand into it, illuminating it as far as the fist-sized yellow light would reach. It was murky water, as deep as they could see. There was no sign of the trooper.

The edges of the hole were beginning to sink into the water. A little depression was being made. Examination revealed the “ground” they were standing on to be very dense and springy moss about three inches thick, tightly woven enough to be slightly waterproof, a pale color that was probably lime green. Echo thought of the vast plains she had seen as they descended from orbit. _Frak me_ , she said to herself. Clearly struck by the same thought, they all turned to look out at the darkness, picturing the kilometers of fungal membrane on every side.

Command knew, of course. That was why they had deployed by chute, and from so low down. A box would have hit the surface and sunk like a stone.

“Is it even safe to walk on?” asked the one with the glow-pack, wide-eyed. It briefly illuminated her name. Alton.

“If it supports Orks, trooper, it’ll support you,” said the Sergeant cholerically. “Or would you like the plateback to hold your hand? The minute is up.” He glared at them. “Well, jump to!”

They kept moving, the Sergeant directing them from the front, water condensing on their weather gear and sliding off. They marched in total darkness, as quickly as the rubbery moss would allow. Echo had to respect how efficiently they moved across the darkened planet. Before her imprisonment, she would have even fallen to the rear. Now though, her feet seemed able to fly across the ground, at least for short distances. She knew the Eldar had done something to her during the blank space in her mind between being hit with Trooper Darrow’s psychic death throes and waking up in hospital on Elysia. The physical enhancements weren’t hard to notice. She just wasn’t sure what the modifications were or how they worked. All she knew for certain was they had fused some kind of casing to her spine, because she could feel it whenever she lay on her back for exercises.

Soon enough, they reached the forest. The trees were broad and smooth-trunked, with high, dense branches that whipped ceaselessly around in the wind. The membrane anchored itself to the trees, forming hard rings around the trunks. Moisture slicked everything. Echo prayed quietly as they walked for no one else to die. The three troopers (Alton, Turner, and Booth, it seemed) clung together, sticking close to the faint glow of the Sergeant’s auspex. She had a feeling that they were muttering among themselves, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Likely they wouldn’t last ‘till the end either, but Echo was not interested in completing this mission herself.

This planet was very much like moving through space without a dradis; you had no idea how fast you were moving or where anything else was. Had it been up to her, she would have tied their waists together with rope. They passed occasional Orks in the blackness, recognizable by their voices. She didn’t speak Ork, and in fact had never even heard Ork before, but this was definitely it. The voices were deep, like they came from something unusually big, and had a _squishy_ bubbling sound to it, like talking through a mouthful of stew. She wished she still had a chronometer. It would be useful to know when daybreak was coming.

Eventually, Sergeant Benning held up his faintly glowing auspex and tapped it. They all gathered around. There was some sort of structure just to the northeast, nearly right on top of them, pictured as a cluster of red dots. There were walls and towers outlined in white. Scattered red flowed around inside. There didn’t seem to be many enemies.

The Sergeant pressed the vox. She caught snatches through the wind. “…Company Five. Ork camp in visual range… small base, about two dozen…” Words, garbled by static, issued back. He put it away. “Let’s move out!”

“Sir,” Echo shouted, fully aware that by asking this question, she was committing an executable offense, “shouldn’t we ask about reinforcements?”

“Are… you being impudent, Stormtrooper?”

“Yes I am, sir! The mechanized companies can only deploy onto solid ground, and this squad is insufficiently equipped to pick up their duties. Are we still expecting reinforcements?”

“Your disrespect is noted, Tandy! You can expect appropriate punishment when we return to Base!”

 _If we return to Base_ , Echo thought. The _Tactica Imperialis_ recommended carpet-bombing in most situations that required an area be cleansed without being able to drop tanks, if nothing important would be lost by doing so. Every soldier of the Imperium must one day meet the planet she would die on, but Echo resented the thought that this one might be it.

An Ork screamed in anger, surprisingly near. They had been discovered, never mind how. Several groups of red dots moved toward them on the auspex. They executed a tactical withdrawal.

Running like hell back the way they had come, Echo imagined she saw the darkness lightening by a degree. Likely it was just her eyes playing tricks on her. The brain panicked about not having light and would try to create some. She had no idea—

— _Augustus cried out somewhere behind her_ —

—where the others were. She pulled out her magnoculars, which barely alleviated the darkness, but the Emperor was with her, and she happened to glance upon the outline of the Ork. Considering all she had heard about Orks being massive, she was rather disappointed. Perhaps these were particularly unimpressive specimens. They were taller than humans but shorter than Eldar, just broad and heavily muscled. It was carrying a large handaxe and running in her direction, its head aimed right at her. It could see. She cursed internally and drew her lascarbine. It was cheaper than her last one and the machine spirit inside didn’t seem to like strangers, but the familiar weight in her hands was still comforting. She switched to dual mode and took a shot, the wind whisking everything away but the muzzle flash. The Emperor was with her; one of them went right through its eye and blew its head into spores. The carbine was angry; it jerked in her hands in a way that told her the charge pack had ejected. No time to fumble around for it in the dark. She found her second pack by touch and reloaded. She scanned with the oculars and grace be, there was the faint blue light of the auspex floating through the trees. She beelined for it.

The Sergeant seemed to have kept the other troopers together. Echo gave silent thanks for his competence. They had stopped for breath, leaning against a tree. Echo took out her handheld glow-pack and passed her hand over it a few times so knew who she was before they shot.

“Sir, the Orks can see in the dark,” was the first thing out of her mouth as she approached. She was beginning to get hoarse. She hadn’t shouted this much since she’d graduated from the PDF.

“I — can see that, Private!” He sounded in pain. She looked down with her oculars, then put them away. Too dark. He slid down the tree a little, and she realized he was dying. There was no other way a sergeant would show weakness in front of his troops. She had seen them literally throw themselves onto a grenade than admit they had already taken a bullet. The troopers all hunkered down next to him, partly to hide and partly to keep an eye on the auspex he held on his lap. Two bits of good news; one, no Orks in the area. Two, it was definitely getting lighter.

Now that he was sitting and the auspex threw a dim reflection on his chest and face, Echo could see the wet shine on his clothes. Looked like he had taken an axe through the chest. She respected anyone who could still run with a wound like that. She pulled out her lho case and offered him one, as was tradition for “retiring” sergeants and troopers. Commissars were more likely to use their dying breath to shoot you for dereliction of duty.

As he took it, the Sergeant coughed almost too quietly to hear, “I should have… reported you earlier, Tandy.” There was real hatred in his voice. A tiny circle blazed to life as he put it to his lips and sucked on it.

“This lot can do it for you,” she said as she administered the second part of the tradition: The Emperor’s Benediction. It was light enough now for her to dimly see Trooper Booth turn his head away from the Sergeant’s remains and vomit onto the ground. She thought she heard a dim explosion in the distance, carried by the wind.

“We’ll do it, too,” Trooper Alton promised. Her pointed face fixed on Echo’s with vast anger and shock in her voice. Idiots. What, did they think a hospital was seconds from being lifted in? “You just _shot_ him! What is wrong with you? What gives you the right, eh?”

“Because I know what I’m doing,” said Echo, already going through Sergeant Benning’s pockets. His gravchute and pack would have to be abandoned, but his cognomen tags, knives, even his Thrones were appropriated without hesitation or remorse. “As of now, I’m also your CO, so shut up and I’ll see if I can get us all off this planet alive.” She cut off the grenade belt that hung on his shoulders and applied a bit of heat from the melter in his pocket to run it back together. Two frag grenades, two smoke bombs. Three firebomb grenades, very nice, although she had a feeling they would soon be redundant. As though to emphasize this, there was another explosion, closer. This time they all heard it.

She shoved the belt at Trooper Alton. “Here, put this on. Jennings doesn’t need it anymore.” She gasped as Jennings’ hard face flashed before her, blue eyes piercing and cold. Booth, the closest to her, blinked in surprise but said nothing. The dead Sergeant looked nothing like her. She stared at his corpse. How could she have made such a stupid mistake?

 _Don’t be a soldier. Be a symbol._ Was that a teaching from Yarrick? Jennings had repeated it once, when the squad had protested going on parade. They—

She shook her head. Irrelevant. Topic at hand. Alton was still glaring daggers but she was putting it on. She kept opening his pockets. Food, water, medicine, all were hastily distributed. Laspistol, charge packs. “Booth. Here. You’ll be covering our rear. Turner! Come here and help me take his vox off!”

“No, no, I…” Turner looked green. Echo glanced at the auspex. No time. Orks coming, fast. They needed to get to a field, where there was at least a chance they would be seen and picked up.

Wait. Was that…?

 _Yes_.

“Move, now!” She led them madly through the forest, so fast they were practically bouncing along the spongy ground. It would have been funny if they weren’t carrying a tail of about half a dozen screaming Orks. Actually, it was pretty funny regardless. Echo kept her eyes up, searching the canopy far above their heads. The explosions were more frequent, and she was beginning to smell burning wood… and fyceline.

There it was. The crashed Valkyrie had flattened the entire top of several trees, the nose poking out of the canopy around spurs of splintered wood. Faint light, occasionally brighter, came through like the Emperor’s blessing. It looked like the pilot had fled; there was no sign of her. Desperately, Echo drew a knife and jumped as high as she could. She managed to slam it into the trunk and hung briefly from it, her feet scraping vainly against the trunk for purchase. Then she got out another knife, courtesy of either the former Sergeant or 328th kit regulations, and started to climb, pushing the left knife in and hauling her body up by one arm before reaching up and punching the next one in. It hurt, but not as much as she had expected. She didn’t trust either to hold her weight, trying to switch between them as fast as possible. Which as it turned out was very fast indeed. She realized suddenly how easily the wind was threatening to blow her over. Was it possible she was lighter? It didn’t seem possible. She paused, breathing hard, and glanced down. The troopers had all diverted to other trees and begun to mimic her, but it was slow going. Unsure who to go after, the Orks had split up and were slowly mounting after each of them.

Panicking, Trooper Alton pulled out a grenade, apparently at random, and threw it. It hit the ground and bounced. The Orks all scrambled into each other trying to get away from it. Where had they already learned that grenades were dangerous? Echo redoubled her efforts. She was already at the top, gasping, when she realized that the grenade hadn’t gone off. Some kind of flying life swarmed around her and she swatted at them in disgust. She looked down. It had been a smoke bomb, and the winds had blown it away in seconds. The Orks were already resuming the attack. She pulled out her carbine and provided some brief cover fire. One advantage of las weapons was, there was no bullet to be blown off-course by the wind. She shot two in the head and missed one, catching another in the arm. It roared and came after her instead, joining the small group scaling the tree.

The troopers could see the destination clearly; there was no way to miss an entire aircraft. She gestured with one arm. She had a single firebomb herself. She pulled the pin and tossed it. The rush of hot air sent them all staggering back with minor burns. Several of the Orks were instantly set aflame and fell. Echo nearly lost her grip herself, ending up balanced on one foot with the other over a watery expanse as the charred moss sank out of sight. She pulled herself back with a sigh of relief. The Ork she had shot in the arm roared as it lost its purchase, falling to the water below. To her slight satisfaction, it sank just as fast as the Guardsman had. Maybe it was all the bits of metal junk it had on itself.

There was only one Ork left, and of course it was coming right for her. It roared faintly and jumped, covering the distance with remarkable speed. But fast as it was, she was faster. She darted away from it, moving between tree limbs. At the same time, all three enlisted fired. Two las shots hit the Ork in the chest; it fell between two low branches and spasmed violently, dying. The third hit Echo in the shoulder. She kept herself from screaming with difficulty. Be a symbol. No room for weakness.

“Come on, you frakking sawedoffs!” she screamed into the wind.

Alton and Booth made the jump from their trees to hers. Turner didn’t. The inexperience lottery hadn’t turned up her number.

No time to grieve. The explosions were very, very close. She staggered up and ran for the Valkyrie’s open door.

Oh, it was good to be back, even absolutely drenched with sweat and swampwater and with her shoulder simultaneously burned and bleeding. She sprinted the length of the cabin and threw herself so violently into the pilot’s seat that one edge snapped. Her MIU, dormant for months, snaked eagerly out of the top of her spine. Trooper Booth screamed. She didn’t have time to explain anything to him. She was already interwiring.

The Valkyrie was named _Planetskipper_. She certainly hoped so. Life support was gone, vox was gone, dradis was gone, severe damage to the right wing, cabin door wouldn’t close. The machine spirit lay heavy on her shoulders like a serpent, wounded and afraid. She pulled rank and tried to force it into obedience. Through willpower, she lifted bars and activated buttons. Visual popped up, flickering in and out of existence. She twitched in her chair and groaned like a woman having a bullet removed. With an effort, the engine popped a few times and then roared to life. Inside her body (Throne, her shoulder hurt) Booth and Alton grabbed onto the handloops above the seats for purchase. They rose unsteadily, pushing hard into the wind. The promethium inferno was spreading rapidly below them; inside the cabin, the smoke was blinding. CO 2 alerts went off, flashing red into her mind. The MIU tried to detach; with difficulty, Echo prevented it.

 She set the skim base; the onboard cogitator rejected it a few times, then it held. Not having to control height was a blessing. They zoomed backward, away from the fire. Thankfully, that way was with the wind.

They stopped dead over the field they had initially landed on. Slowly, the cabin aired out. Echo detached and lay back in her seat, panting. She lit a lho to help with the pain and sat quiet and still for a moment.

But only for a moment. She felt the hot muzzle of a las set against her head.

“You ungrateful bastard, Alton,” she said, blowing out smoke through her nose, pulling out her case and offering the Trooper one to disguise the slight trembling of her hands. Anyone who said they were unafraid when faced with a gun in the face was either a plank or a liar. “And a mutineer to boot.”

“Get out of that chair.”

She did so. Alton sat in the chair and, keeping her eyes fixed on Echo, tapped a few buttons on the dashboard. The cabin door tried to shut itself with a screaming sound before the pneumatics popped and failed. She clearly had some understanding of how the Valkyrie worked, which Echo would have appreciated knowing before. She could have told Alton to operate it and treated her shoulder instead.

She sighed. “Alton, what exactly are you doing?”

“I’m performing my duty as a soldier in the field who saw another trooper shoot her commanding officer in the face.”

“Shooting your CO in the head because they shot your CO in the head. I think that’s what they call hypocrisy.”

Alton didn’t seem to notice Booth quietly moving in the background behind her. Echo kept her eyes fixed on Alton. It was sad, she had a sweet face. Probably she had been meek and jumpy back in Basic. But war affected people in different ways.

“So you admit doing it?”

“Lying is a sin in the face of Him-On-Throne. Sergeant Benning was already dying. I could have left him to suffer from infection, parasites, or choking on promethium fumes. Instead I administered the Emperor’s Benediction. It’s in the _Primer_. Look it up. I’ll wait.”

Glaring, she hesitated. Then she set her kit bag on the floor. True to her word, Echo waited. She wasn’t sure if Booth meant to help either of them, but now was not the time for her to move. Every second was drop or fall. Chemicals were flooding her body, screaming for her to go, but she held on.

Alton had found the index. She wasn’t stupid; she kept her carbine braced against Echo’s head as she moved her finger down the list. There were a large number of things that started with _Emperor_ , and the index was not the most meticulously organized. In fact, it was pretty worthless as an index. Alton flipped a few pages to where the E’s picked back up. They were printed in reverse. Echo’s eyes flicked up to Booth’s, who shrugged a little, apologetically. His sympathies must lay with Alton, although he was clearly uncomfortable with her methods.

Echo waited until she was in the middle of flipping a page. She tried to do nothing more than duck out of the way and instead found her body folded almost totally in half, her chin in danger of knocking against her legs. She could have put a tongue between her own bootlaces. It was easy to put a hand down on the gritty, wet floor and let momentum pull her legs up and over. Her heels hit Alton’s face, possibly breaking her nose. A shot went off and fried something in the dashboard. Klaxons began going off, and the Valkyrie wobbled dangerously.

She lost a moment to pure confusion. The world was moving so slowly. It was like what she usually experienced in times of high adrenaline, but much more exaggerated. Alton seemed to be diving through molasses for her gun, although Echo knew that was just her perception.

Echo landed on her feet, moving normally, and brought up a knife with her other hand. Alton’s throat was opened in a spurt of blood; she fell to the ground dying.

At the same time, Booth had shot, at her or at Alton, she’d never know. She could see the las burst out of the barrel and race across the room at walking speed. How had she ever thought she couldn’t dodge a bullet? She threw herself out of the way with time to spare, flipped off the wall as naturally as breathing, without even having to think about it, and slammed the knife through his neck.

Then she stopped, frozen in horror, as it occurred to her what had just happened. Booth stared back at her. She daren’t pull the knife out. He slowly went down to the floor. He looked grey. She let the handle go and ran for the medicae closet, knowing already there was nothing she could do for him.

She came back with morphine. He seemed in much less pain after it was administered, and didn’t even seem to notice when she slid the blade out. She took his and Alton’s cognomen tags and gear, and “buried” them outside in the water. Nobody would notice a few more holes.

As she stood there watching their bodies sink, the voice spoke from right in the center of her head, in High Gothic. She had no idea if it was sound or just thoughts, but she could vividly imagine the mouth fitting itself around the square, blunt syllables like spitting out sugar cubes. In any case, it was Eldar, and genderless like all of them. It was from the same Craftworld, how did she know that? Its accent? Like the Farseer, its voice carried a reverb. But this voice was darker, deeper, and more melodious. Its name was… Imisra? Elveera?

“Very good, little toy. I see everything has taken well. I picked a good time to activate it, I see. Of course, I always have good timing.”

At this point, Echo was beyond being surprised. She wasn’t sure if her response was talking or thinking either. “You people, eh?”

“I’m disappointed,” the Eldar purred. It didn’t sound it, particularly. “You’re usually so full of clever commentary.”

“I think I left it on your ship, along with my worldly possessions, my friends, and my career.”

“Hmmmm.” It was somewhere between a musing sound and a throaty chuckle. “Well, in order then. Your possessions are all here, locked in a safe. Once the fate brings us together again, I’ll be happy to return them. Your friends… I wasn’t aware you had any. Of course, I admit that the Eldar have no such concept. The closest we have are enemies we’d rather see tamed than dead… in which case I expect you will be proud to count me as a friend.

“The psyker is dead, which continues to disappoint us. Some consolation may be had that her soul undoubtedly went to Slaanesh. The others are alive, well, and very rude. They will be glad to hear that you are the same. As for your career…” it chuckled again, a knowing sound that Echo didn’t like a bit. “Well, it’s just starting, don’t you worry about that. It won’t bring you fame or wealth, but then again, you’ve never particularly wanted those things, have you?”

“You’re full of presumptions, aren’t you,” Echo lied.

“And you’re still an insubordinate, callous adrenaline junkie. Once you crack open that stubborn exterior, anyway. I doubt you remember it, but I at least found it quite enjoyable.”

Echo was quiet. She didn’t want to admit it, but the comment was… a little rattling. Combat and warfare she understood, it was direct and easy to handle. The alien’s implications were the sort of cold-blooded, complicated thing she didn’t.

“I’m sure you have all the predictable questions. ‘What did you do to me?’ ‘Why?’ And of course, ‘What now?’ The simplest answer to all these questions is that my Craftworld has an agenda to advance, and you are a valuable asset that I have chosen to invest in. I hope to use you to help advance that agenda, fulfil a few ancient prophecies, the sort of thing my kind generally get up to. In return, you get enhanced abilities, some interesting extras, and a greatly improved chance of survival for a human. Of course, it isn’t as though you have any choice in the matter. Literally, you cannot resist. It’s part of the programming.”

Echo didn’t say anything. She didn’t have anything to say. The front of her head felt tired and heavy. The alien sighed.

“Back to being silent? Very well. We’ll speak again.”

She woke up curled on the floor, holding her hands over her ears. The entire cabin had been neatened up, although most of the mechanics were still broken. The blood had even been cleaned up.

She sat down in the pilot’s seat and picked up her lho where it had fallen to the floor. A few buttons were instinctively pressed and the wobbling steadied a little. Her brain seemed to be shutting down. Battle fatigue. She needed to fight it, she wasn’t out of danger yet. Just don’t let yourself slow down, don’t spiral. She ate a nutritional block and drank some water. Then she found her thermos and had some recaf, letting it and the lho fight it out. She stared out the view and thought of nothing at all but passing smoke in and out of her lungs. It occurred to her dimly that her shoulder didn’t hurt at all anymore, which was good because the husk was singing her lips. She wiped it away and let the lho fall to the floor. Gingerly, she rubbed her shoulder, and found that her wound had disappeared.

It wasn’t long before another Valkyrie landed and she was transferred. Very few questions were asked, a stark contrast to the last time she had returned alone from a mission. She was even praised for bringing back the equipment.

Back at base, she had finally been assigned a bunk. She was almost too exhausted to stand, but couldn't fall asleep for a long while. When she did, thank the Emperor, she had no dreams at all.


End file.
